Special Ops: Host and Network Security for Microsoft, Unix, and Oracle

It isn't often I come across a book on security that gets so much right. While I think of myself as a subject matter expert on matters of security I was pleased at how much depth this book contained and how many tips I picked up. The SQL and IIS chapters are perhaps the best coveraged of their subject matter I have yet seen.The coverage is balanced between the various colors of hats people wear and contains masses of recommendations for hardening the various components discussed.

Yesterday morning I spent the better part of an hour in an interview with a reporter. The topic: "If you were giving advice to a brand new security officer, a CSO, or CISO, about how to avoid being fired in their first year, what would you tell them?" After the interview I started to read Special Ops and if there was any way to go back in time I would have told that reporter, tell them to buy Special Ops and read it at least three times. I normally classify books into a couple of categories; there are books about things and books that tell you how to do things. Special Ops weighs in at a thousand plus pages and covers Windows XP, 2000, Outlook, Exchange, Unix, Security Policy and much more, yet does not fall neatly into either category. So what category is Special Ops?Dan Lynch, a founder of the Internet and the founder of Interop once used a term, Bogon filter, years before BGP was invented. Bogon, apparently, was a synonym for blarney if you get my drift. Technical people will tell managers and auditors almost anything because they are pretty sure they can get away with it. The chapters in this book are written by brilliant people; they are packed with useful information. You will not learn enough about securing XP to hang out your shingle, but if you read that chapter a couple times you will certainly be on solid ground to determine if the consultant you are considering hiring to secure your XP systems knows enough to even get near your computer facility. The auditor that invests the time to read this book cover to cover three times should be given a t-shirt that says "Fear me". Special Ops can help you develop a bogon filter better than any other single book I have seen on the marketplace.Chapter 18, Creating Effective Corporate Security Policies, is one of the most fascinating chapters in the book. Though obviously it covers material that can be found in other places, the authors clearly knows their stuff; it is pure pragmatic advice. The warnings ring true and the links are there.Though content is the most important ingredient of a technical book and Special Ops is packed with content, layout is also important. The book was happy to lay flat within the first four minutes I was playing with it. The fonts are well chosen and large enough to be readable, the paper is substantial. I do have two complaints regarding layout. After the first reading, it will primarily serve as a reference book, so running a camouflage overprint across half of the table of contents was less than brilliant. The same goes for the silly FAQ stamp on top of the questions. Never intentionally make a book hard to read! On the other hand, summary links for more information and an FAQ for every chapter show a real concern for the needs of the reader. As always, just buying the book and putting it on the shelf will not make your systems and network more secure. I have only met Erik Birkholz twice, but I truly believe that if you come up to him hoping fo

I'm not sure what book this guy from Orange, CA was reading, but I found all kinds of new and relevant information in several chapters! The chapter on Terminal Services was especially enlightening. Many new things to consider when rolling this one out to the enterprise! Yikes.I think the reader from Orange missed the whole point of the book. It wasn't intended to be a catalog of the latest and greatest tools on the market - like the Hacking Exposed series - it looks like it was designed to help internal security staffs think differently about how they secure the critical components of the enterprise. This includes how they write their policies, and consider the human factor in the security equation.I have personally used the book's content to create focused audit programs and been very successful at doing so.Please create more books in this series!

"Special Ops" is one of the most useful security books I've read -- and my library includes 92 titles acquired since 2000. "Special Ops" is not "Hacking Exposed" with a white-and-camouflage cover. While the "Hacking Exposed" series is more assessment- and enumeration-centric, "Special Ops" spends more time on proper installation and deployment of services and applications. Most usefully, "Special Ops" succinctly and powerfully addresses topics neglected by other security books. It's difficult for security staff to keep up with the security details of new services and applications. Admins often rely on general purpose manuals, heavy on page count but light on security specifics. Although "Special Ops" weighs in at over 1000 pages, it is the first book to devote attack- and defense-driven chapters to services and applications that matter most. Where else can one find essential, concise security advice on Active Directory (ch. 6), Exchange and Outlook Web Access (ch. 7), Microsoft Terminal Services (ch. 9), Microsoft SQL Server (ch. 12), and Oracle (ch. 13)? These were my favorite chapters, combining examples of attacks, defenses, and proper deployment. Other chapters broke new ground on old subjects. Had admins taking ch. 10's advice on disabling WebDAV, their Web servers would not have been susceptible to the latest Microsoft IIS vulnerability. The explanation of DNS in ch. 8 is one of the best ever written, and its installation instructions for DJBDNS are sorely welcome after the latest BIND vulnerability. Suggestions for modifying the war dialing tool Tone Loc in ch. 2 save assessors time and effort. Ch. 14's UNIX advice expands beyond the traditional focus on Linux to include Solaris and the BSDs, including discussions of RBAC and filesystem ACLs. I even found something new in the wireless section (ch. 15). Beyond the product-specific material, "Special Ops" integrates several key themes. Logging, auditing, compartmentalization, network architecture, exposure as "bi-directional visibility," disabling unnecessary services -- many are applied throughout the book. Because the book features contributions from nearly two dozen authors, it is sometimes internally repetitive and inconsistent. The "CAM" of ch. 15 is incorrectly called "computer-aided manufacturing," while ch. 16's excellent explanation of switch security correctly deciphers "CAM" as "content addressable memory." I would have liked reading about different ways to determine hotfix and patch levels for Windows and UNIX, or at least how existing tools make their determinations. Advice on properly applying Windows service packs, patches, and hotfixes was missing. Ch. 6 assumed a working knowledge of LDAP, which should have been included, at least as an appendix. All of these can be addressed in a second edition. Overall, "Special Ops" is an incredible book. The authors (thoughtfully identified, chapter by chapter) took the time to explain the internals of the applicat

I had been waiting for this book to come out for a while, and I bought it at Black Hat when it first came out a couple of weeks ago. I've been reading it since (it's big, almost 1,000pages)and now that I am finished I must say it's the best computer security book that I've read. I'm a security consultant so I have to be current on all the most popular platforms. I haven't seen any other book that covers as many things to the level of detail of Special Ops. There is a very good balance between the theory and practice of network design and security. This one will definitely occupy primo real estate on my book shelf.